nytimes.com Design Director Q&A

This is an interesting installment in the New York Times' "Talk to the Newsroom" series -- a question and answer session with Khoi Vinh, Design Director.

In the discussion, he notes:

Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we've created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.

This actually goes back to my first post. That is HUGE number of blogs!!! Way too many, in my opinion, and I think that the fact that only a third of them are still active is a testament to that. Granted, some may be blogs devoted to specific news events. For instance, I know Newsday had a Pope Blog to chronicle the recent papal visit. (Not sure how successful that was, but seems like kind of a silly idea to me.) The Times, though, had this special section, which I think is well-designed and works well.

Vinh also notes that they use Word Press to publish their blogs, not their custom content management system. It seems like it would be only a matter of time before blogging technology is built into their CMS.

Other interesting points from the Q&A:

• They prefer to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver
• They are focused on maintaining the 150-year-old brand identity of the Times, even in the online medium
• They recognize The Guardian as a competitor that uses design well

Moment of Truth

I was glad to read this profile of Sports Illustrated reporter Gary Smith, who is one of my favorite journalists. He wrote one of my two favorite pieces of sportswriting, an article called Moment of Truth about a photograph of the TCU locker room before the January 1957 Cotton Bowl. It features this passage, which I think will demonstrate why it's one of my favorite articles:

The older you get, the more you realize that this is what sports are most about: the moments before, the times when a person takes a flashlight to his soul and inspects himself for will and courage and spirit, the stuff that separates men such as Jordan and Ali from the rest more than anything in their forearms or their fingers or their feet. Who am I? And, Is that going to be enough? That's what you're peeking at through the door, and believe me, those are two big and scary questions, the two best reasons for all of god's children to play sports, so they can start chewing on them early.

If you want to read the rest of the article, it is -- interestingly -- available on Google Books. I don't really understand Google Books and what it has and what it doesn't, given the copyright issues, etc. Maybe a topic for a future blog post.

For the record, my other favorite piece of sportswriting is John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Great headline. Favorite passage here:

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall,
bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for
minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Why No Most Viewed?

I have been annoyed for a long time at the fact that the New York Times make available its lists of the most emailed, most blogged and most searched articles -- but not the most viewed. These lists, while I suppose interesting, completely fail to tell me what the most important article in the newspaper was. The one that, if I want to know what everyone else knows, I should read.

Instead, the most-emailed list tells me which articles people find either funny or relevant to people in their lives. For instance, travel articles (like this one on Yosemite, currently in eighth place) make this list with what seems like a disproportionate frequency. But this isn't surprising if you think about the circumstances. People reading these articles are likely to have trips planned to the destinations being written about. And they are likely to have companions on these trips. And of course, they want to send them the article. They also have friends and acquantinces who know they have the trip planned, and who want to make sure that they've seen the article. So they email it too. None of these reasons, however, mean that I should read it. Since I don't plan on visiting Yosemite any time soon, the article is of literally no value to me. But there it is, on the list.

It seems like another big reason that articles get emailed is for their human interest value or humor. For instance, the article in the number two position on the most-emailed list is "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Worries," a feature story on "nakations" -- nudist resorts and vacation destinations. This story is entertaining. It is funny. It is a good read. And at the end of it, you want to share it with your buddy or your significant other, with a jokey note.

When I worked at the Post, we used to call these stories "talkers." There's no news value, but it's something you want to talk to people about -- and these days, something you want to email them about.

All of that is fine and good -- but it still doesn't help me figure out what people are reading.

Likewise with the "most searched" list, which right now looks like this:

bush
health
china
obama
food
education
immigration
iraq
tibet
modern love

All of these terms are too vague -- food?!?! -- for me to have any idea what stories people are reading. The top search term, "bush," returns 126,530 results. Not helpful. The most interesting thing to see here is that the Modern Love column is obviously popular and should be more prominently placed on the home page so that people can find it without searching.

I also suspect that reporters would like to know which articles were read the most. While they may get this info from periodic internal analytics reports, it would be nice to see it in real time.

Technology, Journalism and TV

Back around Super Tuesday, we discussed in class the cool interactive touch-screen map that CNN has been using to display voting-district-by-voting-district results on the night of each primary.

With the touch of a finger, John King can show us not only what's happening in a state but what could happen. For instance, a typical state on the night of a Democratic primary has dark blue (Obama) clusters around urban areas, while the rural parts of the state are colored light blue (Clinton). But in an instant, King can zoom in and show us the undecided areas, where the votes haven't been counted or the polls haven't closed yet. Then, with a touch of the finger, he can hypothetically call that area for one of the candidates -- and then we see whether that puts them over the edge in the state or not. It's even faster than real-time, it's pre-predictions.

So, it's no surprise that old media like the New York Times want to get in on this action. As I mentioned in a previous post, nytimes.com features an interactive election map as well. But without the touch screen, it's not nearly as cool. So instead, the Times did a feature-y, personal profile on John King. As a huge CNN fan, I did enjoy finding out that he is engaged to reporter Dana Bash. Besides that detail, the article didn't hold a candle to the experience of watching him on election night. I'm looking forward to seeing a) if other networks will invest in the technology, which was made by a company called Perceptive Pixel, and b) what happens to John King's career.

An Internet Phenomenon as Seen by Old Media

As a student journalist at The Hoya, Georgetown's newspaper, I worked alongside our somewhat inane sex columnist, a girl named Julia Baugher. She was the subject of much office consternation, as an outsized personality in the midst of a bunch of newspaper geeks, and things only got worse when she a) plagiarized a column on Christmas gifts, b) had a series of fights with her editors and c) after she was fired, told everyone (i.e. TV networks) that it was because the Jesuits at Georgetown couldn't handle her racy column.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. (Anyone who has watched someone they dislike become famous will understand why, I think.)

The short version: After college, Julia Baugher moved to New York and decided to reinvent herself as a personality named Julia Allison. She had several different stints in the dating columnist/media airhead/famous-for-nothing/commentator/sexpert/general annoyance arena before landing her latest gig as editor-at-large for Star magazine.

Around this time was when her life on the Web really took off. She started a blog (which she updated CONSTANTLY) and began dating Jakob Lodwick, one of the founders of College Humor. They decided to start a blog about their relationship, jakobandjulia.com. As you can see, that went horribly awry and they basically broke up on their blog. Which was only more fodder for other blogs (mainly in the Gawker family). They began chronicling Julia's every move -- which is easy to do, given how much she puts out there (see: http://twitter.com/juliaallison) -- in a harshly negative light. There is even someone out there who hates her so much they have an entire blog devoted to criticizing her. Basically, she exploded and is now EVERYWHERE I LOOK. (All of this negative attention, by the way, has led to her taken a so-called hiatus on her blog -- but she manages to show up on everyone else's blogs, not to mention her own Twitter and Facebook pages as well as on CABLE, of course.)

Suffice it to say it wasn't much of a surprise on a recent Sunday when I opened the New York Times to find this.

The lengthy profile gets some of her story right. But it misses just how much of her success -- and failure? -- is due to her constant Web presence. This is a woman who has fully embraced technology, and it's not embracing her back! Commenters on Gawker routinely say things I cannot reprint here about her, and they've obviously done real damage. It's a form of online bullying, and it seems like the Times doesn't quite "get" that. She's not Carrie for the Internet age, because Carrie was beloved and respected and popular! And Julia is a Web outcast. The article mentions the vicious comments, but it fails to grasp the power that they have and the dynamics that are really at play -- how the hatred has the ability to bring her down (fewer, at least, wide-eyed blog posts about her dating life) and build her up (more vicious comments on Gawker is Nick Denton's idea of a good time).

Urghhhhhhhh.

WSJ Secretly Free!!

I love this -- a workaround for the Journal's subscription wall. I need to investigate more ... and will be watching for when they turn it off.

Two More Spitzer Notes ...

1. Interesting to see that the latest Paterson news (that he and his wife also had extramarital affairs) was broken by the Daily News, in an exclusive interview -- but because they teased the story online, the Post had time to get it on their cover. Incidentally, the fact that he chose the Daily News is the kind of thing that is a big deal among beat reporters in Albany, who are all competing with each other for the same stories.

2. This Q&A is fascinating, particularly for journalists to see how the Times talks about things like this, and something we would never get access to if it weren't online.